E.J. Peiker, Nature
Photographer

Welcome to the
quarterly update from E.J. Peiker Nature Photography. In this
quarterly email publication, I will keep you all posted on upcoming
workshops including the DuckShop Series as well as sharing some photos
and experiences with you. I will also give you brief impressions on any
new equipment that I get the opportunity to use and any other general
information in the world of digital nature photography. Please feel
free to forward this along to other photographers and interested
parties. If you would like to be added or deleted to the mailing list
or if you would like copies of past issues, just send me an email
message at
ejpeiker@cox.net.Back issues (sans photographs) are available online at
http://www.ejphoto.com/newsletter.htm.

EOS
1D Mark III – Why I haven’t Made the Switch!

On paper, the EOS 1D
Mark 3 is a huge leap from its predecessor, the EOS 1D Mark IIn. While
the pixel increase from 8.2 to 10.1 is miniscule, that’s not what this
camera is about. This camera is a complete redesign of the inner
workings of the EOS digital system and for the first time, rids itself
of some of the arcane hangovers from the film days. Some of the new
features include:

-10.1 Megapixel Sensor

-14 bit per pixel color increasing the
number of discrete color values per pixel from 4096 to 16,384

-Integrated sensor cleaning system

-New Autofocus system with 19 high
precision sensors that also autofocus in conditions that are a full stop
darker than its predecessor

-Lithium ION battery which results in a
significant weight reduction

-A higher durability shutter rated at
300,000 activations MTBF

-Dual DIGIC image processors – both are
a new and faster DIGIC III generation

-Elimination of customizable functions
that require you to hook the camera to a computer

-Individual lens focus calibration
capability

All of this stuff
sounds great and yes I do want all or at least most of these features.
So why haven’t I upgraded? This is a completely new camera with
completely new inner workings using a new processor with completely new
camera control logic, new autofocus system and many completely new
features such as live view and integrated sensor cleaning. Being a
nearly 25 year veteran of the electronics industry, I know that when you
combine this many new technologies all at once, there is a very high
probability of it all not working together the way it needs to
initially. It is also unlikely that a testing program by the
manufacturer will even come close to exploring all regimes that this
camera might be used in. Even when it came to upgrading computers to a
new technology, I waited until some of the technical and manufacturing
bugs were worked out. I most certainly would want to wait on a new
system as complex as an EOS Pro camera costing $4500.

As many of you know,
my experience with brand new Canon products has not been good and I have
had to return or repair a number of cameras and lenses that I bought
from the first one or two production cycles. Those were evolutionary
products with only minor systems changes. The EOS 1D Mark III is a much
more substantial change. So for now I am holding off. I also am
curious to see what the inevitable EOS 1Ds Mark III will offer before I
make a purchase decision.

NOTE: The above was
written prior to a scathing review of the new Autofocus System by Rob
Galbraith - I am glad I heeded my own warnings as there are many varying
reports of problems with the way the Autofocus system tracks targets.
Rob Galbraith has done the most definitive tests that I have seen:
www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-8740-9006

New
Stuff I Did Buy

There are a couple of
new products that I did purchase from Canon recently but these are
products that went through a relatively simple upgrade and I wasn’t
worried about initial problems.

EF 70-200 f/4L IS – I
replaced my beloved non IS 70-200 f/4L lens with the new IS version
after it had been out about 6 months. I am very glad I did. While the
non-IS was a fine lens rivaling the best zooms in the world, the new
70-200 f/4L IS is the sharpest zoom ever produced by Canon and I dare
say by any manufacturer. There is simply nothing that comes close. Not
even the highly acclaimed 70-200 f/2.8L (IS and non-IS). I wish all
Canon lenses were this good.

EF 16-35 f/2.8L II – I
did upgrade to the new version of the 16-35 simply to get brighter
corners. My old lens was a relatively good performer even on the wide
end but with full frame sensors, it lost a lot of light (not as bad as
the 24-105 wide open tough). The new 16-35 incorporates a wider barrel
and larger front as well as an optical design that allows light to hit
the sensor corners more squarely. This results in about 1 stop brighter
corners than the old lens. Canon also claims the lens is sharper in the
corners but in my experience this is not the case – it’s about the
same. The downside of this lens is that it does seem to have slightly
more barrel distortion than its predecessor but chromatic aberrations
are somewhat reduced. Overall, it’s a toss-up on whether this is a good
upgrade or not. If dark corners bother you, then yes it is. If curved
horizons bother you, then it’s not a good upgrade. If both bother you,
like they do me, then it’s a toss-up.

Building the Ultimate Photo Editing Machine

At the end of April, I
teamed up with computer builder Falcon Northwest (www.falcon-nw.com)
to build a phenomenal performing photo editing platform. For those not
familiar, FalconNW builds some of the very best PC’s in the world. They
use premium components, tested beyond the component manufacturer’s
specifications and they work with each client individually to build a
machine customized for them. If it is possible to do, they can make it
happen. They do not outsource technical support and when you call them,
you immediately get a human being that really knows what they are doing.

We ended up building
an Intel Core 2 Quad system based on the 2.66GHz Kentsfield
Microprocessor. While a 2.93GHz processor is now available, I felt that
the minor performance gain was not worth the major increase in system
price and the increase in power consumption. The Kentsfield Core 2 Quad
(QX6700) processor incorporates 4 2.66GHz Core Micro architecture
processors working in parallel for maximum performance on any
application that is threaded. A threaded application is a program that
can execute multiple computation strings simultaneously if given
multiple processors. Photoshop is such an application and major
performance gains can be had running it on a multiprocessor platform.

For the Motherboard,
we used Intel’s Extreme Edition B975BX2 board. There are a number of
choices here, some more customizable than Intel’s board but for maximum
compatibility with excellent performance, this board was the way to go
as it will absolutely run anything and everything ever written for the
PC platform.

For memory, we used
Corsair’s ultra high performance DDR2 memory and installed 4GB of it.
Just one look at a Corsair DIMM and you will realize this isn’t your run
of the mill memory module. They are tested to much tighter standards
than the memory manufacturer and are capable of being over clocked
substantially if you choose to go that route.

For program and
operating system storage, I selected a Western Digital 150GB 10,0000RPM
Raptor drive. This is one of the fastest seek time drives there is and
is the current choice for a high performance system drive. For data
storage, the Falcon guys and I debated the direction to go. They were
trying to steer me clear of RAID 5 due to the length of time it can take
to rebuild the array but the only way I could get 1TB of storage with
redundancy into the chassis was to go this route as the new Hitachi 1TB
drives were not yet available to do a RAID 1 set-up with and I wasn’t
comfortable with the lack of redundancy of a RAID 0 set-up even though
on paper that would give slightly better performance – whether or not it
does in the real world is debatable anyway. So ultimately, I went with
three Seagate SATA II 500GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

When it came to
choosing a graphics card, I debated long and hard before finally setting
on a new generation DirectX 10 nVidia 8800 card. This is top of the
line and nothing I would likely ever do would even make this card break
a sweat as photo work does not at all tax a graphics card. My reasoning
however was that as the next couple of years played out, there would be
more and more programming that required DX10. Even some of the higher
end versions of Microsoft’s Vista operating system requires DX10 for
certain features. So when push came to shove, I overspeced the system
with the nVidia 8800 card. I only got the 320MB memory version of the
card because nothing I can envisioning doing with this card would ever
need even half that much.

Since this is a next
generation machine, I gulped and opted for Vista Ultimate. More on that
in a minute!

To top off the system
I added an integrated floppy/12in one card reader, DVD-RW drive, CD-RW
drive, and a wireless network card. We used a 750 Watt Silverstone
Strider Power Supply, Zalman CPU Cooler, and put it into FalconNW’s
highly acclaimed aluminum ICON case.

The system arrived
about 3 weeks later with tons of documentation, Falcon’s own test data
on my system and a human sign off on the installation, operation, and
performance of every component in the system. A schematic for my
specific system was included as were all of the accessory items that
shipped with each of the components but weren’t necessary for my build.
It also came with a T-shirt, coffee mug, and a special FalconNW coffee
blend.

The next step in this
adventure was to set-up the machine. First I installed 5 more USB2
ports on top of the 8 that the system came with, connected my Apple 30”
monitor, keyboard, Logitech Laser Mouse and then I fired it all up.
Everything worked perfectly out of the box and it automatically
installed limited drivers for the wireless keyboard and mouse so now it
was time to start installing software and drivers. The first thing I
noticed is that virtually every mouse click grayed out the screen and
popped up a box wanting to verify that this is actually what I wanted to
do. I immediately figured out how to turn this off by disabling a
module called User Account Control (UAC) – this is also the module that
renders most monitor profiles useless so this was a good change. In a
single user, administrator account environment, this does not pose any
significant security risks.

The first problem I
ran into was that my anti-virus program of choice (Prevx) did not run at
all –actually it wouldn’t even install properly. I checked the Prevx
site and found a Beta for Prevx2 that was supposed to work with Vista
but it did not work either. So I downloaded a trial version of Trend
Micro’s Vista anti-virus program to at least give me protection for the
time being – the trial lasts for 30 days. At this point I downloaded
the latest Vista drivers for my mouse and keyboard and got them back to
being able to use all of their special functions.

I had no real problem
installing all of my normal software including specialty programs like
Photomatix and the new multiprocessor version of PanoramaFactory.
Photoshop CS3’s installation went so much smoother on this clean install
than it did on my old XP system. Then it came time to turn this machine
into a color managed machine. As I had been warned, my Xrite DTP94
colorimeter was not recognized by the system and Xrite has no drivers
available for Vista. The driver disk that came with the Xrite also did
not have a driver that would install under Vista. So I went on a Google
fishing expedition to see if anyone had solved this problem and sure
enough somebody more clever than me found a workaround. It is now
listed on several sites and the language is a bit hard to follow as its
been translated from another language but this is the best explanation
of how to do it I’ve found:

Once I had everything
installed and everything tweaked the way I wanted, I ran some Photoshop
comparisons between old and new systems. Here are a few comparisons:

Test

Pentium 4 HT,
3.2GHz, 4GB DDR2-533, XP Home, PS CS3

Core
2 Quad, 2.66GHz, 4GB DDR2-800, Vista Ultimate, PS CS3

Photoshop Load

43
seconds

2.9
seconds

EOS
1Ds2 RAW Conversion – ACR 4.0

9.3
seconds

1.3
seconds

Full
Frame 16.7 megapixel Lens Blur Filter with 10 history states

4
minutes, 21 seconds

47
seconds

NIK
Color EFEX Pro Sunshine Filter – 16.7 Megapixel

24
seconds

6.4
seconds

ACR Color
Calibration Script – 16.7 Megapixel

1 hour, 43
minutes

17 minutes

As you can see, the
productivity increase in Photoshop is absolutely enormous!

Photoshop Tip

This issue's Photoshop
Tip is an old one but many people still ask about it.

Q. What is the
fastest way to level an image?

While there are many
ways to level an image, for me the fastest way is to use the ruler tool:

The original image is
tilted slightly in the counter-clockwise direction. Note that the eye
of the primary image is somewhat to the left of the eye in the
reflection:

First we select the
ruler tool:

Next we draw a line
that we want to use to level the image – in this case we will line up
the reflection of the eye with the primary image. Note that in a
landscape photo, you can do the same thing by drawing a line across the
horizon which will then be leveled in the subsequent steps:

The leveling process
from this point is incredibly easy as we let Photoshop do the work for
us.

Simply select Image >
Rotate > Arbitrary – you will see that Photoshop has already done the
rotation calculation for you and you simply click on OK:

You will now need to
crop off the background space created due to the rotation and your final
product is complete:

DuckShop 2008 Slots Still Available

If you ever thought
you would want to attend a photo workshop but have trouble with the full
week or more commitments, my DuckShops are perfect for you. They are
either 2 or 3 day weekend events in generally sunny and temperate
climates such as Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico. You get
some serious bird photography instruction, learn about the species
themselves and have some close encounters of the swimming feathery kind.

I still have a few
slots available for this winter but hurry; these generally are gone by
the end of summer.